It's summertime (at least in the northern hemisphere), and while a lot of us are planning our vacations, inspiration does not have a calendar or schedule. So the JBoss team continues to balance work and break time, continuing to deliver great software (in fact we have seen a bountiful harvest of releases since last week) and rally around great ideas for our future roadmap. Here's what happened:

An Arquillian wave

The Arquilllians have launched another full-scale assault on bug lands, with a slew of releases covering the core and extensions.

• First, Karel Piwko has announced the release of Arquillian Drone Extension 1.1.0.CR2 - mostly a bug fix release.
• Bartosz Majsak followed close with Arquillian TestRunner Spock 1.0.0.Alpha2 - a component upgrade and bug fix release as well. If you haven't had a chance to try Spock, it's a good moment to give this  Java/Groovy test and specification framework a try now - 
• Jakub Narloch continues his highly successful Google Summer of Code project with the release of the Arquillian Spring Extension 1.0.0.Alpha2. This is in fact a major overhaul of the previous release providing:
  • the Spring integration functionality has been reorganized so it does not target specific versions, but capabilities (xml, JavaConfig, environment). While capabilities can be traced to the releases in which they have been introduced, this provides a more intuitive way of deciding what needs to be included in the tests;
  • an embedded Spring container has been added, allowing faster testing of features that do not require container capabilities;
  • the Spring extension has been integrated with Arquillian Warp allowing the testing of Spring MVC artifacts like controllers while using Warp and Drone to specify client actions;
• And last but not least, Aslak Knutsen has announced the release of Arquillian Core 1.0.2.Final, containing bug fixes and minor but important enhancements such as environment variable support.

Check all of them out - those bugs won't stand a chance.

Well-designed business processes with JBPM and Drools

A few updates for jBPM, covering enhancements to the visual design support and services:

The jBPM team has announced the release of jBPM designer 2.3.0.Final (read Tihomir Surdilovic's post for more details). And if you thought that business stuff can't be cool too, check voice-driven BPM.

Mauricio Salatino (aka Salaboy) provides some insights into the jBPM form builder.

Also, Microsoft Academic Search has been added to the jBPM community service thanks to the community contributor Omar Saif.

The biggest strengths of the tight jBPM/Drools integration in jBPM5 are highlighted by another post by Mauricio, who shows us a very useful set of patterns combining processes and rules.

Finally, Geoffrey de Smet demonstrates, with hard data, the benefits of the new Selector architecture in Drools Planner 5.5.0.Beta1, concerning memory consumption and general performance.

More secure with JBoss AS7 and JBoss EAP6

Although the Arquillian team will keep us safe from the bugs, there are many other threats that your application is facing. Luckily, you have many options for securing your JBoss applications. Shane Johnson shows us a pretty advanced option: enabling the special Intel AES-NI instructions that accelerate AES encryption and decryption on JBoss EAP6 running on RHEL6. Why is it important? For one thing, faster cryptographic operations means that you can use stronger options without paying a performance penalty - and read the rest of the article to learn what and how.

On the development side, Marek Posolda shows us how to integrate 3rd party identity and service providers with Picketlink: the example covers Google Apps and Salesforce. In the current environment where Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service integration is often a requirement, this is a compelling showcase of Picketlink's capabilities, but also an informative practical guideline.

And it's worth mentioning here that Anil Saldhana, JBoss' lead security architect has been selected by OASIS as an OASIS Distinguished Contributor as a recognition of the commitment to contributing to the advancement of open source security standards,

Infinispan 5.2.0.Alpha2, now with more Map/Reduce

The Infinispan team has announced the release of Infinispan 5.2.0.Alpha, and Vladimir Blagojevic describes quite in detail the Map/Reduce enhancements that have been included in this release.

Change of helm for TorqueBox

With Bob McWhirther's move as Director of Polyglot for JBoss, the leadership of TorqueBox has passed on to Ben Browning. Congratulations, both Bob and Ben - and keep those releases coming. Oh, one just did:TorqueBox 2.1.0.Final is out.

Output buffering for servlet requests

JBoss' own Lincoln Baxter continues enhancing his Rewrite project - a trove of useful components for request-driven processing in web applications - regardless of the view technology being used (JSF, Spring MVC), etc.  The last addition as of release 1.1.0.Final is output buffering, which complements the response-enhancing facilities already in place.

Community JBoss Mastery

The excellent site mastertheboss.com continues it's great series of tutorials with an example of using TimeMachine scheduler on JBoss AS7 by Zemian Deng. A great example of the JBoss AS7 architecture allows seamless integration with other community projects.

In addition to that, Francesco Marchioni shares his thoughts comparing JBoss and Oracle middleware, based on earlier blog post by Oracle comparing the two. A good read, especially since it reflects the views of an independent community member.

Forge gets a new site

Also, the Forge project has a new, Awestruct-powered site. Check it out here.

Other releases

• JBoss Portlet Bridge 3.0.0.CR1, which passes now the TCK for portlet bridges with JSF
  
• Teiid 8.1.CR1 fixes no less than 69 issues

Sightings

• JBUG Beijing has met on July 26, with a rich agenda, featuring Java EE and the Cloud, Hibernate OGM and HornetQ.
  

Thanks for reading our newsletter and see you next week for another roundup.

For many of us within the JBoss Community, Red Hat Summit and JBoss World was the culmination of much work over the preceding months; with numerous project and platform releases, presentations and demonstrations all being finalised in time for the conference.  The weeks that followed have seen lots of us taking a well deserved break in order to recharge our batteries but, unfortunately, this also means that this week's editorial is a little light on content.  But never fear, what we do have is definitely worth exploring .....

JBoss World Keynote

One of the highlights of this year's JBoss World was the keynote demonstration, used to showcase many of the technologies that are now present in the projects and platforms.  The backend services utilised BRMS and jBPM, in order to provide Business Analysts with an easy way of defining and modifying the business logic that was used to drive our simple Toy Store, and exposed a set of REST APIs which could then be consumed by client applications.

As part of the demonstration Kris Borcher developed HTML5 client applications to provide buyer, approver and Vice Principal functionality to a mobile workforce.  These clients could be run through a browser, directly from an OpenShift server, or deployed as a native application on mobile devices thanks to the power of Apache Cordova.  If you want to find out more about the client applications and how they were developed then head over to Kris' post for more details.

Infinispan at JBoss World and JUDCon

The Infinispan project had a great presence at JBoss World and JUDCon with Galder, Manik and Alan Santos all playing their part.  Galder was on stage with Heiko to give a presentation entitled "Effectively Manage & Monitor Red Hat JBoss Data Grid Nodes".  Galder has more information about this presentation, along with his favourite highlights of the conference, in his post "JBoss Data Grid lands in Red Hat Summit".  Vladimir was also at the conferences although he was drawn more to the presentations on Infinispan's Map/Reduce and distributed executor capabilities.

Continuous Enterprise Development in Java

Andrew Lee Rubinger, Dan Allen and Aslak Knutsen have begun work on their next book, "Continuous Enterprise Development in Java", which will be published by O'Reilly Media.  The book will guide the user through some of the most common and interesting use-cases in building multiuser applications and will be based on the work being done through the JBoss Developer Framework.  They are currently on course to begin the Early Access Program around the time of Java One 2012 with the formal release in the Spring of 2013.

Custom Analyzers for Fields in Class or Field Bridges

Prompted by a number of enquires in the Hibernate Search forums and on Stack Overflow, Hardy has written a good article explaining the options available for defining custom analyzers for fields which are introduced through Class or Field Bridges.  All his solutions use only functionality which is available in the latest Hibernate Search release.

IntelliFest

Members of the Drools team will be attending IntelliFest in October, providing the normal Drools & jBPM bootcamp in the run up to the main conference.  Registration for the bootcamp is free but places are limited.

New Releases

The Ceylon team have announced the M3.1 release of Ceylon and the Ceylon IDE.  This release addresses several bugs and introduces a number of significant improvements in the language module and IDE.

The Hibernate team have made successive releases of Hibernate ORM, first announcing Hibernate ORM 4.1.5 followed quickly after by Hibernate ORM 4.1.5.SP1 to address an issue which slipped through the net.

Bela has announced the release of JGroups 3.0.11 and 3.1.0.

The ModeShape team have announced the release of ModeShape 2.8.2.Final, addressing some issues which were discovered after the previous version had been released.

That's all we have at the end of a quiet week.  Drop back next week for more updates from the JBoss Community.